At the Chongqing Novel House & Other Poems

by Kate Rogers

At the Chongqing Novel House

In Chengdu, Dufu’s house nests in a garden, in a steel and glass forest. He wasn’t there. No one to drink with. Night spilled its ink all over my words.

In Chongqing I find this house, unbroken, by a large pit. Plaster flakes mound in corners, sticky rice, for my empty stomach. Burnt chairs make good charcoal. I diagram my escape on the walls, sketch the pent up power of my limbs. My characters fill every space. I follow the bird to see where it will roost.

I heard about the man in Hong Kong. King of Kowloon, he drew his story under bridges, on the walls of banks. We are not supposed to know about him on this side of the border, though his family came from Guangdong. The police hunted him chapter by chapter, came with paint to erase his words, but he always found more blank space – on a pillar at the bus depot, in an alley where stray cats wound their tails round his ankles as he flicked his brush over brick.

His words are hard to find now, but I hear he wrote on umbrellas before they became popular.

When I finish covering the walls here I plan to go north to Shanxi, where some still live in caves. I want a burrow in a hillside, a stone bed, no windows to distract me with light.

The Borrowed Children

After The Blood of the Children, by SG.L.Lim

Grief was asleep until the childrencamped out on the highwaythat used to shrink the city, stood and swayed to songs of defianceunder a sea of umbrellas,did homework on the pavement,turned exhaustion into a party.

Grief was asleep until they were gassed by adults who used totake their hands,lead them home when they were lost,until clouds came down from the mountainsand settled in the city.Two girls who loved words in the classroom,tasted clouds on the road,on the subway platform.The city was fogged in,office ladies and bankers wept with the children,made them box lunches. Thirteen year olds,wanted to speakto their leadersand be heard.Eighteen year olds pushed hard against barriers.

Grief could not sleepwhen they were beaten with fists which felt no pain,men who think children must tastethe bitter iron of new blood.

Who could care too muchabout borrowed children –the ones who come to class to sleep,the ones who earn A’s without turning up at all,especially the ones who lapse back into Cantonese with such comfort in my classroom,who, when I suggest they choose English for an hour,demand to know,

How can Beijing be a metonymn for us?

I will never joke with them againabout being the language police.

My grief was asleep during a decade of writing references, staying at work lateto meet application deadlines students forgot until the day before.

For all these years I’ve borrowed children to fill my heart for the ones I lost. My punishment is caring too muchthis time they will not win,to worry that I’ve taught them to ask too many questionsfor the country they inherit.